Quality evaluation of the Family Health Strategy in a medium-sized municipality

ABSTRACT

The study aimed at evaluating Family Health Units (FHU) considering the essential attributes and derived from Primary Health Care (PHC). It’s a evaluative, quantitative research with a cross-sectional design, carried out in 35 FHU of a medium-sized municipality of Mato Grosso. Data were collected using a sociodemographic questionnaire and the Primary Care Assessment Tool (PCATool) involving 397 adult users and 59 professionals from these services. The results reveal that users were mostly female and of low education level. As for the professionals, there was a high turnover rate, with a crowding time of less than two years, and a predominance of individuals with no specialization in PHC. Regarding the performance of the services from the perspective of the users, all attributes were evaluated as unsatisfactory, except Use and Information System, which presented scores above the cutoff value (6.6). In contrast, in the opinion of the professionals, all the attributes were evaluated as satisfactory, except for Accessibility, that obtained score 5.28. The low values for most of the attributes, obtained from the perspective of those who use the service, highlight the difficulty of the FHU in achieving the attributes of the PHC and impose the need for reflections on the structural and organizational barriers present in the services.

KEYWORD
Primary Health Care; Family Health Strategy; Health evaluation; Health services research